This outrageous treatment, this brutal contempt for the workers from their pretentiously patriotic rulers may seem to the reader impossible. The case, however, is so typical as to be worth space for evidence. And here is some testimony from witnesses not prejudiced, perhaps, in favor of the workers. Professor J. E. Thorold Rogers writes thus of the matter:[[123]]
“In point of fact, the sufferings of the working classes (in England) during this dismal period [the first twenty years of the nineteenth century] ... were certainly intensified by the harsh partiality of the law; but they were due in the main to deeper causes. Thousands of homes were starved in order to find means to support the great war, the cost of which was really supported by the labor of those who toiled on and earned the wealth which was lavished freely, and at a good rate of interest for the lenders, by the government. The enormous taxation and the gigantic loans came from the store of accumulated capital, which the employers wrung from the poor wages of labor, or the landlords extracted from the growing grains of their tenants. To outward appearance, the strife was waged by armies and generals; but in reality the resources on which the struggle was based were the stint and starvation of labor, the over-taxed and underfed toils of childhood, the underpaid and uncertain employment of men. Wages were mulcted in order to provide the waste of war, and the profits of commerce and manufacture.”
The case is summed up by another authority:[[124]]
“Distress instead of plenty, misery instead of comfort—these were the first results of peace.”
The English historian, J. R. Green, is thus frank:[[125]]
“The war enriched the landowner, the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer; but it impoverished the poor. It is indeed from these fatal years that we must date that war of the classes, that social severance between employers and employed, which still forms the main difficulty of English politics.”
S. R. Gardiner furnishes this testimony:[[126]]
“Towards the end of 1816 riots broke out in many places, which were put down.... The government ignored the part which physical distress played in promoting the disturbances.... The Manchester Massacre ... a vast meeting of at least 50,000 gathered on August 16, 1816, in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester.... The Hussars charged, and the weight of disciplined soldiery drove the crowd into a huddled mass of shrieking fugitives, pressed together by their efforts to escape. When at last the ground was cleared many victims were piled one upon another.”
The people who had fed and clothed and armed the soldiers, were now cut down and trampled down in heaps by mounted soldiers. The historians Brodrick and Frotheringham summarize the matter as follows:[[127]]
“Four troops of Hussars then made a dashing charge ... the people fled in wild confusion before them; some were cut down, more were trampled down; an eye-witness describes ‘several mounds of human beings lying where they had fallen.’”